Taylor Morrison bills its Lighthouse as “a luxury urban oasis” at the edge of the now-vacant Banning Ranch, with ocean and city-lights views from the rooftop decks of its 89 detached, townhome-style homes.

Homes in the Costa Mesa development rise three stories high on small lots, with room on the roof to lounge, barbecue and socialize.

The project has four floor plans offering three- to four-bedroom units, each with 1,800 to nearly 2,300 square feet of living space. Prices range from the mid-$800,000s to more than $1.1 million.

Forty are live-work units with offices on the ground floor. The rest have carports. All have enclosed, two-car garages. The kitchen and great room are on the middle floor, along with either a dining area or a fourth bedroom. The top floor is bedrooms. For those who like a more traditional layout, Lighthouse offers homes with a yard plus a bonus two-car carport.

Lighthouse boasts a pool, spa, bocce ball court and dog park, but its biggest amenity is its proximity to the beach.

Plans for the neighboring Banning Ranch call for homes, shops and a resort hotel, but developers and environmentalists still are fighting over what will go on the Banning Ranch land and where it will go.

Baker Ranch ranks among the top three new-home communities for a second straight year, with a combination of parks, clubhouses, pools and stylish houses and townhomes.

Built by Toll Brothers and Shea Homes, the master-planned Lake Forest highlands development will have 1,750 homes in 19 neighborhoods when finished, 11 of which already have sold out.

Currently, Shea is selling townhomes in The Rowe and The Courts starting around $600,000, and houses in The Landing and Crestline starting above $700,000. Toll Brothers is selling houses in The Trails, The Crossings and Viewpoint, starting at $900,000 to $1.2 million.

Home sizes range from 1,400 to almost 4,000 square feet.

Baker Ranch bills itself as a “resort-style” community designed for active people who love the outdoors, with neighborhood parks, a dog park, three clubhouses and pools.

3. Portola Springs
West of the 133, north of Irvine Boulevard, Irvine
949-393-5077

Perched on Irvine’s northeastern edge adjacent to Whiting Ranch and Santiago and Silverado canyons, the sprawling “village” of Portola Springs offers a wide variety of housing, along with parks, pools, tot lots, trails and picnic areas.

When sales began in 2006, about 3,550 homes and 950 apartments were planned for the 2,600-acre development north of the Orange County Great Park. The development is about two-thirds complete.

Current sales include new flats in the Indigo neighborhood starting under $600,000. For that, you get almost 1,200 square feet above a two-car garage, with a great room, a kitchen, two bedrooms and two bathrooms. Four-bedroom houses in the Legado neighborhood start at under $900,000 with up to nearly 2,400 square feet. The other neighborhoods – The Vine and Silverleaf — have townhomes and courtyard homes.

For more than a decade, Jeff Collins has followed housing and real estate, covering market booms and busts and all aspects of the real estate industry. He has been tracking rents and home prices, and has explored solutions to critical problems such as Southern California’s housing shortage and affordability crisis. Before joining the Orange County Register in 1990, he covered a wide range of topics for daily newspapers in Kansas, El Paso and Dallas. A Southern California native, he studied at UC Santa Barbara and UC Irvine. He later earned a master’s degree from the USC School of Journalism.

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